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Via Emptywheel (now at her very own free-standing url, and you should check it out if you haven’t already), because it seemed like the right way to start another morning.
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What else is on the mid-week schedule?
Get pissed, destroy
Here’s your storyline for 2012.
From the media’s perspective, Mitt is now so 2000 and late. I do think there is an essential truth underneath the Rickmentum, and that’s that Perry pisses liberals off in a way that Mitt never could.
Look at vouchercare, other than pissing off liberals, what did it have going for it? Look at Bachmann and Trump, other than pissing off liberals, what did they have going for them? The trouble, of course, is that Bachmann, Trump, and vouchercare also piss off many, or even most, non-liberals.
Never lose sight of the fact that conservatives are mostly motivated by the desire to piss off liberals. It explains almost everything they do. Maybe, just maybe, in some strange way, it gives us the power to control and undo them.
Cleek’s definition of modern conservatism was the smartest political observation I’ve seen in a while:
today’s conservatism is the opposite of what liberals want today: updated daily.
Maybe I’ve gone totally insane and my methods are unsound, but I now think that Romney can’t win the Republican nomination because he just doesn’t piss liberals off enough.
Tuesday Evening Open Thread
The Best Democracy Money Can Buy
Interesting. Imagine how much money you could raise for large appearances:
In what appears to be an effort to avoid the free-for-all town halls that have plagued recent contentious congressional recesses, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and other Republican members of Congress have chosen to charge admission to their home-district appearances.
Ryan will speak September 6 to the Whitnall Park Rotary Club in Greenfield, Wisc. Admission to the event is $15 per person and includes lunch.
Ryan has no free public town hall appearances scheduled during the recess.
The last time he held a free town hall, in Milton, Wisc. in April, Ryan was booed while trying to explain his proposal for the federal budget, which included drastic cuts to entitlement and benefit programs. Other Republicans around the country were on the receiving end of similar heat from their constituents. Ryan even had police remove one heckler from a town hall event in Racine, Wisc.
Love it.
Early Morning Open Thread: It’s Not Us; It’s You
Jonathan Bernstein at the Washington Post Plum Line has a nice sharp little “Note to pundits“:
Here’s what you need to know about the Republican candidate field: this is it. No one starts running for president in August, less than six months before the voters start getting involved in Iowa and New Hampshire, and has any chance at all. At least, it’s never happened since the modern process has been fully in place (say, by 1980). And there’s no reason to expect it now…
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The other thing I’d say to Republicans disappointed in the current choices (as Ross Douthat says he is today) is this: What you’re upset with isn’t the candidate — it’s the party. It’s inconceivable that anyone could get the Republican nomination while using anything but solid Tea Party rhetoric on pretty much every issue. They’re all going to claim that taxes should never, ever, ever be raised no matter what, that half of what the government does is evil or unconstitutional or whatever, that the scientific consensus on climate is some sort of crazed conspiracy, and so on down the line. I’ve been saying for some time now that the odds are against Republicans actually nominating a candidate who believes crazy things — but the odds of them nominating someone who says crazy things has gone up.
There is no Man on A White Horse remaining who can ride up and save the Republican Party, and its media enablers, from themselves. There’ll be no shortage of horse shit, however.
Early Morning Open Thread: It’s Not Us; It’s YouPost + Comments (69)
Sell yourself as a man to save
I wonder if Mitt Romney’s best strategy might be to convince the Republican establishment to try and save him from the teahadist hordes in the primaries. Maybe he can’t attack Perry too much himself (without alienating the 27 percenters) but Crossroads GPS can. This kind of crazy talk from Perry must scare the shit out of Republican strategists:
Responding to a question about the Federal Reserve at a campaign event in Cedar Rapids, Perry said: “If this guy prints more money between now and the election, I don’t know what y’all would do to him in Iowa, but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas. Printing more money to play politics at this particular time in American history is almost treacherous, or treasonous, in my opinion.”
If Howard Dean accused some Fed chief of treason, the Washington Post editorial board would have written 20 or 30 editorials about it; it could be the subject of an entire book by Charles Lane. As it is, Perry won’t take all that much heat for it, but it’s pretty far over the line and I don’t think he’ll be able to get away with this kind of thing in the long term.
Open Thread
Today’s goodies- home made whole wheat bread:
Baking relaxes me, I find.